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theses

“Ambivalent Hegemony” explores the Dutch adoption and subsequent rejection of Javanese culture, in particular material culture like dress, architecture, and symbols of power, to legitimize colonial authority around the turn of the twentieth century. The Dutch established an enduring system of hegemony by encouraging cultural, social and racial mixing; in other words, by embedding themselves in Javanese culture and society. From the 1890s until the late 1920s this complex system of dominance was transformed by rapid technological innovation, evolutionary thinking, the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, and the intensification of the Dutch “civilizing” mission. This study traces the interactions between Dutch and Indonesian civil servants, officials, nationalists, journalists and novelists, to reveal how these transformations resulted in the transition from cultural hegemony based on feudal traditions and symbols to hegemony grounded in enhanced Westernization and heightened coercion. Consequently, it is argued that we need to understand the civilizing mission ideology and the process of modernization in the colonial context as part of larger cultural projects of control. By emphasizing the interactions between the colonizers and the colonized, this study brings into focus a shared colonial space, thus bridging the fields of Indonesian and European colonial history. These interactions are explored in a number of sites that have proved of particular relevance. For example, the study of Javanese status symbols, such as the ceremonial parasol (payung), deference rituals, and a hybrid sartorial hierarchy reveals the ways in which the material grounds of colonial authority were contested. Likewise, an examination of hill stations, their architecture and function, illuminates the growing concerns surrounding the “physical body”, and fears of Westernization and Javanization among the Javanese and Dutch respectively. The various narratives are brought together in a discussion of annual fairs, their attractions, appearance and objectives in the colony’s capital at Batavia (Jakarta). These transformative themes in the history of Indonesia, which stress the place of material culture in legitimizing colonial regimes, are treated in depth for the first time as dimensions of a coherent process.

ETD_5766

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Arnout Henricus Cornelis van der Meer

doi:10.7282/T30R9R1N

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.